You will organise collected customer language into a file grouped by problem, outcome, objection and trigger.
By now you probably have customer phrases in three or four places: a notes app, a few screenshots, a page of interview transcript and a list from your competitor research. Scattered like that, they are hard to use. You will remember the two most striking ones and forget the forty that repeat. This exercise puts everything in one file, sorted so you can see the patterns, and it becomes the first half of the writing kit you will use for the rest of the course.
Allow about 35 minutes. You need every phrase you collected in lessons 1.1 to 1.3 and a spreadsheet or a document with a table.
Create a table with four columns and a narrow fifth one for the source:
Problems: what is wrong, in their words Desired outcomes: what they want instead Objections and doubts: what made them hesitate Triggers: what made them act when they did
These four match what a piece of copy has to do. Problems tell you how to open, so the reader knows the piece is for them. Outcomes become your promises and benefits. Objections become the answers and proof you place before the call to action. Triggers tell you when people are most ready to hear from you, which helps with timing and with hooks.
Go through your collected material and paste each phrase into the column it fits, with its source. Keep the customer's grammar, slang and spelling. "Wah, the homework every night is a war" stays as it is. If you tidy it into "homework causes family conflict", you have kept the meaning and lost the line.
Some phrases fit two columns. "We tried two tutors already and nothing stuck" is a problem and also a doubt about whether anything will work. Put it in the column where you would most likely use it, or in both.
Leave out anything that identifies a person, such as a child's name or school. You are keeping the words, and the person does not need to be in the file.
Read down each column and look for phrases that say the same thing in slightly different words. "Goes blank in exams", "freezes when it counts" and "knows it at home but not in the test" describe one problem. Group them together and keep a tally.
Repeats matter more than vivid one-offs. A memorable phrase from one parent may describe only that parent. A problem that six parents describe in their own different ways is one that many of your readers share, and a headline built on it will reach more of them. When the tally is done, highlight the five phrases or groups that came up most often across the file.
Here is part of Priya's file after an hour of sorting. The sources are shortened.
In Problems she has "goes blank in exams" (three enquiries), "freezes when it counts" (one review of a competitor), "knows it at home but not in the test" (interview), "fine until fractions" (two enquiries) and "cries over homework" (one enquiry, one interview). The first three are one group with five mentions. "Fine until fractions" and a forum post saying "P5 maths is a big jump" form a second group.
In Desired outcomes she has "wants to stop dreading maths" (interview), "able to check her own work" (review) and "one less thing for me to manage" (interview). The last one surprised her, as you saw in lesson 1.3.
In Objections she has "worried it's another expensive thing he hates" (two enquiries), "will a group class be too fast" (three-star review of a competitor) and "can't do weekday evenings" (four enquiries).
In Triggers she has "after the year-end results came out" (four enquiries), "teacher said she rushes" (one interview) and "cousin's kid improved" (one enquiry).
Her top five were the exam-freezing group, the weekday-evening problem, the results trigger, the P5 jump and the cost worry. Not one of them was on her old website. Her old homepage talked about "all-round development", a phrase no parent in the file had ever used.
The file is only useful if you write from it. From module 2 onward, every lesson will ask you to use it. Keep it somewhere you can open in one click, and paste new phrases in as they arrive: a striking enquiry, a fresh review, a line from a call. Set a monthly reminder to add what came in and update the tally, because what customers say shifts with the school year, the economy and your own changes.
In module 3 you will add a second sheet beside this one, listing your features, benefits and proof. Together they make the writing kit the rest of the course draws on.
You may find you have fewer than 40 phrases, or that one column is nearly empty. Both are useful findings. An empty Triggers column usually means you have not yet asked anyone about the moment they decided, which is a good reason to book the interview from lesson 1.3. Do the sort with what you have now, then go back for more where the gaps are.
Sort at least 40 customer phrases into the four-column file and highlight the five that appear most often.
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